Automation

Overview
Previous versions of Visio made connections into different data sources. For instance, you could ping networks and connect up to Active Directory. Visio 2016 does not connect up to Active Directory directly, and the Active Directory Topology Diagrammer does not operate from inside Visio.Running the Active Directory Topology Diagrammer

I have been writing scripts (e.g. vbsscipt,BATCH,Powershell,BASH,etc) to automate various redundant tasks over the past decade. A  few years ago I discovered a software called winautomation, I never got a chance to put it through its paces....until recently. I needed to have some sql backups moved from one location to another, this had to take place on a daily basis. In the past I would have wrote a powershell script or BATCH file to handle this, then use the task scheduler to run the script at the needed time. Instead I decided to give winautomation a shot at this, I downloaded the trial version & installed it on the box I needed the tasks to run. After that I opened up the console and I noticed so many available actions sorted by category (e.g. system actions - run a application,etc conditional statements,loops) and the list goes on. I created a job then inserted a move files action, next I put in the source and destination for the transfer. In the winautomation world it looks like

I ran this job and it worked!!! which was great. Now I wanted to add a house cleaning task which was I wanted to only retain 30days of data in the destination, to this I wrote a powershell script to do this for now, {code}Get-ChildItem -Path "driveletter:\" -Recurse | Where-Object LastWriteTIme -LT (Get-Date).AddDays(-30) | Remove-Item {/code} and saved it. Now the really cool thing I saw is that it has the ability to record mouse & keystrokes via a macro recorder, I figured I would try the next phase of this with the macro recorder.  I started the macro recorder and proceeded to open powershell, then I did cd / cd folderlocation followed by .\remove30dayoldfile.ps1 finally ctrl+alt+s to stop the macro recording.  The job actions resulted in 2 line entries


With all of this in a single job now I save then run it. The result ends up being exactly what I wanted, to finish it off I added a schedule trigger so it can run at the time & date that I needed and lastly a send email notification
once the schedule trigger was complete. So far this has been working great, I will be purchasing this because it will be a huge time saver to automate certain task very easily instead of writing complex code.